It’s 2020. Black Death, Black pain, and Black anger stagnate the air. The toll of life under the unrelenting weight of whiteness has unearth the rancid and left bare the U.S. history, the rangled bodies of buried and un-buried Black people yearning to breathe free. The metal shackles of enslavement morphed into the financial shackles of low-waged employment, unemployment, amidst economic booms performed out on privileged bodies – non-Black, careless, callous and reckless.
It’s 2020. In the U.S. 100,000+ are dead in less than a trimester, the air quickly cleared of pollution as automotive and air travel halt. The same air thickens with the pungent taste of racism – some the lips and tongues smacked sweet as the cellular tug of the ancestral call for rituals of dehumanizing acts onto the bodies of Black Others. Prove whiteness: affirm belonging and allegiance to segregation, Jim Crow, the Action Block, the dislocation of millions of African peoples. Some lips smack with delight. It’s feasting time.
It’s 2020. And, Coronavirus (COVID 19) eats its way through African American communities collecting breath like trinkets for souvenir. The current occupant of the house on the hill, chest puffed, laughs. Life is Sweet. Lips smack with delight minute by minute, the delicious aching tug of racism’s ancestral calls. The pandemic that has been with US for 400 years years.
It’s 2020. Fiber-optics in the ground. Satellites in the sky. Internet live stream Black Bodies fighting for a full breath of whatever air is possible. ‘I can’t breathe’. Yearning to breath free. Tear gas, pepper spray, bullets, and Coronavirus (COVID 19).
It’s 2020. The street are filled masked and unmasked. Truth and clarity – the gift of Coronavirus (COVID 19). Everyone sees. Not everyone breaths. Noxious, obnoxious, and obscene innocence – the lie of whiteness identity and allies.
It’s 2020. Black bodies piled high on street corners, in funeral homes, hospitals, jails, parking lots, and on lawns.
It’s 2020. Pandemic Racism meets Pandemic Coronavirus (COVID 19): Black Bodies.
It’s 2020. Don’t stand close. Don’t even try to breathe. Enough.
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